Everything matters for Rivers, Chargers

The Chargers' quarterback Philip Rivers has a conversation the referee as teammate D.J. Fluker looks on during the first quarter of the Chargers preseason game against the Seattle Seahawks at Qualcomm Stadium on Thursday.
Hayne Palmour IV

The Chargers' quarterback Philip Rivers has a conversation the referee as teammate D.J. Fluker looks on during the first quarter of the Chargers preseason game against the Seattle Seahawks at Qualcomm Stadium on Thursday.

Getting Rivers to discuss why everything matters was easy – much easier than getting him to acknowledge he was the impetus for it becoming a catch-phrase at Chargers Park.

I’d been hearing it for months. Players and coaches dropped it in conversations often, matter-of-factly, as if it were Biblical.

I’m telling you, folks, as I’ve told you for years, Rivers is the real deal. At Chargers Park, what he says is not only what goes, it’s what is said.

Rivers dropped it on the team sometime in the spring, imploring them to commit to every play at every practice, to every minute of every meeting, to every workout.

It’s not that he hadn’t exemplified everything mattering before or hadn't imparted it in different ways. But a men’s retreat he attended in the offseason carried the message, it became a sort of family motto, and then Rivers played it forward to his team.

The football-breathing world has talked a lot about how Rivers' level of play this season will be perhaps the biggest factor in the Chargers’ success or lack thereof. And it may well be, along with the running back and offensive line who will or will not give him some breathing room.

But, too, contained in that phrase that Rivers brought to bear at Chargers Park, is the key to the Chargers’ season.

Everything matters to this team.

They are tenuous, even brittle, at so many positions, an injury or two could cause an unraveling. There is no true No.1 receiver. To say the offensive line is better than last year is almost a backhanded compliment.

Simply, the Chargers will not dominate opponents.

They will earn their victories the way they did in the third preseason game last month. With the starters playing the entire first half, the Chargers ran their offense with efficiency, made stop after stop on defense, covered kicks like plastic wrap and even blocked a punt and a field goal.

“That’s the way we’re going win games,” free safety Eric Weddle, the Rivers of the defense, said afterward. “Team effort.”

It goes along with Mike McCoy’s emphasis on details, something so many Chargers veterans list as the greatest impression of their first offseason with the new head coach.

For three years this team has not turned possibility into reality. “If only” has become a debilitating disease. They've fallen just short (of wins, of the postseason) as much because of untimely blunders as due to a deterioration of talent.

It’s difficult to believe there will be a quick fix. But if McCoy is the next rookie head coach to lead his team to the postseason, it will be largely because of Rivers for more reasons than the passes he completes.

McCoy was asked to explain the meaning about a shirt the coach was wearing one day this week.

“That all the little details, what we worked on all camp long, all offseason, everything we’ve done around here, that there’s no detail too small to talk about,” he said. “Everything we do, it doesn’t matter what your job is, you’ve got to do it the right way.”

The shirt he wore had across the front, in capital yellow letters, just two words.